VMware today has announced its completion of the acquisition of Pivotal Software — a cloud-native platform provider. As a result of the completion of the acquisition, Pivotal’s Class A common stock was removed from the listing on the New York Stock Exchange with trading suspended prior to the open of the market today, and Pivotal will now operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of VMware. The transaction represented an enterprise value for Pivotal of approximately $2.7 billion.
Pivotal’s offerings will be core to the VMware Tanzu portfolio of products and services designed to help customers transform the way they build, run and manage their most important applications, with Kubernetes as the common infrastructure substrate. The combination of Pivotal’s developer-centric offerings with VMware’s upstream Kubernetes run-time infrastructure and management tools will deliver a comprehensive enterprise solution that enables dramatic improvements in developer productivity in the creation of modern applications. VMware is able to offer product building blocks and integrated solutions that are tested and proven with technical expertise that customers need to accelerate software delivery across data centre, cloud, and edge environments.
According to Pat Gelsinger, CEO at VMware, “It’s my pleasure to announce Ray O’Farrell as the leader of VMware’s new modern applications platform business unit—uniting the Pivotal and VMware Cloud Native Applications teams.” “And as Pivotal is now part of VMware, I want to thank the Pivotal leadership team for building a great company. Together, we are poised to be the leading enabler of Kubernetes with a deep understanding of both operators and developers,” further added.
Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager, Modern Applications Platform Business Unit, VMware believed that “The digital transformation and the applications that drive should not be restricted only to cloud and software giants.” Rather he believed that “Modern application development solutions and practices need to be easily accessible to everyday enterprises across the globe. With Pivotal’s developer capabilities as the foundation, we’ll focus on delivering consumable, enterprise-ready cloud-native offerings to customers to help them achieve better business outcomes.”
Edward Hieatt, senior vice president, customer success at Pivotal also mentioned how Pivotal has fundamentally changed the world’s biggest brands by building and managing software with a focus on developer productivity through platform abstractions and development techniques as well as connecting the business with the developer.
He said, “The combination of Pivotal and VMware offers the most comprehensive application platform in the industry and is a win for our customers, be it from Pivotal or VMware. We’re excited to team up with VMware to help more enterprises become like modern software companies by adopting DevOps and Lean techniques developed by internet giants and the startup community.”
Numerous mutual customers including Raytheon have reacted positively to the news of the acquisition. When asked, Todd Probert, Vice President for C2, Space and Intelligence at Raytheon said, “By working with both Pivotal and VMware, we’ve been able to completely transform how we write software for our military and government customers. Combining these companies under a single umbrella is going to make it possible for my team to get code to our customers even faster and easier.”
Under the terms of the transaction, Pivotal’s Class A common stockholders are entitled to receive $15.00 per share cash for each share held, without interest and less applicable tax withholdings, and Pivotal’s Class B common stockholder, Dell Technologies has received approximately 7.2 million shares of VMware Class B common stock, at an exchange ratio of 0.0550 shares of VMware Class B common stock for each share of Pivotal Class B common stock.
